With the development of multimedia communications technologies, a variety of multimedia services constantly emerge. Therefore, multimedia service quality plays an essential role in fields such as multimedia processing and multimedia communication.
In a traditional network device performance test, people are usually concerned only with forwarding performance of a device itself and quality of service (QoS) of a protocol (e.g. an Internet Protocol (IP)) for interconnection between networks, for example, indicators such as a throughput rate, a packet loss rate, and a delay. In terms of an implementation manner, a network device generally applies different priority policies to traffic of different service types, so as to ensure that each type of service flows is processed in a most appropriate way. For example, a voice flow is very sensitive to a delay and therefore is usually assigned with a relatively high priority; however, a data flow (such as file transmission or an email) has a low requirement for real-time performance and therefore may be assigned with a relatively low priority. Consumers of a multimedia service usually do not concern a priority of traffic or the number of lost data packets. They are more concerned about whether a Voice over IP (VoIP) call is clear, whether a video program plays fluently, and whether an image is clear. VoIP is used to digitize an analog voice signal (Voice) for real-time transmission on an IP data network (IP Network) in a form of a data packet. From this perspective, how to ensure user experience quality is a key factor that really needs to be considered during network device development and testing. Therefore, it is very important for a network device manufacturer to strictly test a device of the manufacturer in a laboratory and formulate, by simulating a real network environment and characteristics of a user service flow, methods and indicators for Quality of Experience (QoE) measurement. QoE can be understood as user experience or user perception, that is, a user's subjective feeling on performance of a streaming media service.
Currently, there is no effective solution for monitoring playback quality of streaming media that is established based on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). For example, for the most widely-used Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) streaming media that is based on the TCP protocol, it is necessary to propose a QoE measurement method and indicator to measure user experience on streaming media quality.